DDS3 DAT tape ejected immediately

[Dave Dewar]

Hi,

Couple of things here, firstly the tape width on all DDS media is 3.81mm, HP round it up to 4mm in the labelling etc. Tape width is not the issue.

Secondly, it is not a good idea to do as your customer was doing and alter in any way the holes on the bottom of the cartridge. As you discovered this is the root of the issue. This is not some clever trick they are doing and they should not have to alter the holes to fix their "eject" problem and in fact it will only make things worse as you have seen.

The drive uses the holes to determine whether it is using a DDS1,2,3 etc tape. It will then write the appropriate format to the tape. By altering the tapes they will end up writing the wrong format to the tape or even worse the drive could think they have inserted a cleaning cartridge or have produced an invalid hole configuration that the drive will not recognise.

Please discourage you customer from doing this in the future

Cheers,

Dave Dewar

[Marino Meloni_1]

Also my five cents,
the holes are used to identify the cartridge model as said by Dave, If you customer use the cartridge as a DDS1 because he covered all holes, be aware that he will never be able to use again the 12/24 gb capacity of the cartridge, because the unit will write down using different magnetic field and you will not be able to remove this trace in order to write as a DDS3.
So I think the best way to solve is to send back the cartridge to the productor and asl for compatible DDS3 cartridges.

Marino